This first collection of poems by Honor Moore brings together such much-acclaimed
poems as First Time 1950, My Mothers Moustache
and Spuyten Duyvil. Several of Memoir's twenty-five
poems explore in richly personal terms such public issues as the nuclear
threat, AIDS, the struggle for accommodation between the sexes, sexual
abuse. All of the poems, in a style described by Marilyn Hacker as consummately
textured, most elegant when most desperate, explore the turbulent
course of love, including erotic, sensuous love as well as the many-layered
attachments to family. June Jordan praises Honor Moore for being a poet
who can boast, I am not afraid to begin to love or to keep
loving.

Honor Moore is the author of The White Blackbird, the biography
of her grandmother, Margarett Sargent. Her verse play, Mourning Pictures,
is anthologized in The New Womens Theatre, which she edited.

As if excavating her life, Honor Moore has uncovered with care the
artifacts of the heart, and with deep intelligence explored the fissures
in common speech and the shiftings of consciousness beneath them. At memorys
insistence she has written this book, which opens with one of the most
important poetic meditations on nuclear war to have been published during
the past decade and concludes with an intimate, almost epistolary poem
about a friend who died of AIDS. We are thus in the presence of a poet
who can be praised not only for the eloquence and musicality of her voice,
but also for the courage of her moral engagement. It is not only beautiful
work, it is brave. Carolyn Forché